7.3 (Leonardi and Jackson 2008)

mergers between two technology companies

cultural studies of postmerger integration

A core technology is “the primary technology produced, serviced, or sold by an organization”.

technological grounding suggests that “an organization’s core technologies are, along with the work and communication practices enacted daily by members, a constitutive feature of its culture”

two dominant perspectives for understanding culture that exist in organizational literature:

• as a variable that can be changed.
  + technology is a variable . The two variables are distinct and can be either internal or external based on researchers’ perspective.
  
• culture is organization.
  + in postmerger, organizations face cultural convergence. + technology is not a variable but a practice. + “When technologies are sufficiently important to an organization to become key elements in the constitution of a culture, we refer to that organization as technologically grounded.” (a continuum not dichotomy).
  + “technological incompatibility implies the incompatibility of organizational cultures and practices”

Method: a single case design, embedded design:

levels of analysis
(1) public discourse from company officials about the merger, (2) organizational practices and policies before and after the merger (3) worker responses during postmerger integration

US West built its culture on the West culture use analog data
Qwest built its culture on speed use digital data (all internet protocol - IP)

Qwest consumed US West’s culture (e.g., bureaucracy) due to its technological superiority and cultural superiority in postmerger integration

Qwest shut down US West’s Research Labs.

References

Leonardi, Paul M., and Michele H. Jackson. 2008. “Technological Grounding: Enrolling Technology as a Discursive Resource to Justify Cultural Change in Organizations.” Science, Technology, Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243908328771.